This is a review of a Brooklyn Museum art exhibition called "It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby." Gadsby is a standup comedian who has lambasted Picasso for being a sexist. The show has a smattering of works by Picasso juxtaposed with various works by women that are presented as telling women's "stories," with inscriptions on the wall like "I want my story to be heard” and “entirely new stories”:
This elevation of “stories” over art (or at least comedy) was the principal thrust of “Nanette,” a Sydney stand-up routine which became an American viral success during the last presidency.... “Nanette” proposed a therapeutic purpose for culture, rejecting the “trauma” of telling jokes in favor of the three-act resolution of “stories.” It directly analogized Picasso to then-President Trump: “The greatest artist of the twentieth century. Let’s make art great again, guys.” It even averred that Picasso, and by extension all the old masters, suffered from “the mental illness of misogyny.”...
“My story has value,” Gadsby said in “Nanette”; and then, “I will not allow my story to be destroyed”; and then, “Stories hold our cure.” But Howardena Pindell, on view here, is much more than a storyteller; Cindy Sherman, on view here, is much more than a storyteller. They are artists who, like Picasso before them, put ideas and images into productive tension, with no reassurance of closure or comfort. The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to present to all of us these women’s full aesthetic achievements; there is also room for story hour, in the children’s wing.
I've been hearing the buzzword "stories" — and "storytelling" — since the 1980s. It has always irritated me. I liked hearing Farago's blunt statement of why it bothers him.
Have I ever talked about my irritation with this feminist concept of "storytelling"? Actually, yes. It was set off by Sarah Palin making fun of Katie Couric for saying she wanted to engage in more "multidimensional storytelling." Probably much more, but I'll stop here.
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Classical painting is pleasantly visual. Avant garde painting requires the secret decoder ring to know what the cool art critics think is cool. To normal people most of it looks like crap.
If Prof. Althouse doesn't like "stories," then she doesn't like CRT. Lucky thing for her she is retired.
The point of "Three Musicians" is the dog under the table.
Is it ever possible for these people to just see a painting or a piece of art and have a honest-to-God sincere, individual reaction to it?
I reject the idea that I'm supposed to like a piece of art because it "Challenges" me, or because its "difficult", or conversly that I'm supposed to DISlike it because the painter was an "X-ist" or its not "Comforting".
It seems that some people can only digest art if there's a "Story" attached to it. That strikes me as sort of moronic, but if it floats their boat, I guess its ok.
Finally, if Picasso is "the greatest artist of the 20th century", then that doesn't say much for 20th century art. He certainly was a great talent, but whether his paintings are the greatest, is certainly open to question.
"turn their backs on what challenged them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch"
Is it more noble to seek out what "challenges" them? What does it mean to ennoble, rather than merely satisfy, a preference for comfort?
"multi-dimensional storytelling"
That's what our vulgar Ruling Class has been doing ever since they sold their honor & souls to launch Obama upon us, then doubled down to get Hillary Up, then quadrupled all effort when Trump trumped em all.
My outlook is grim that we won't ever get the citizen freedoms back that we lost with Bush/Pelosi Patriot Act, and further nullified by Obama with his over-federalized police state, IRS FBI etc. It's clear Biden is simply ObamaNation phase 4.
The American Moment is done, 400 years of subjugation may be ahead.
I'm stuck on the phrase, "But it's women artists ..." Someone should've edited that.
Would fewer visitors attend a showing without Picasso in the title? Of course. His name recognition pulls people in the door. Why will you include Picasso unless you have a theme? That's ok. It's the grade school motivational notes that repulse me. Hang the art and let the viewer make their own connection.
Gadsby is a standup comedian who has lambasted Picasso for being a sexist.
What artist could not be personally condemned?
What critic finds it more difficult to condemn the artist than the art?
The media continues to describe Hannah Gadsby as a comedian. That is storytelling at its finest.
this is like the old saw about music..
There are Two Types of music; Pop(ular) Music, and Unpopular Music
I guess there are Two Types of painting too; Pop Art and Unpopular Art
Raise your hand if you're tired of hearing women tell the same story over and over. Starting to understand why the Bible tells women to keep quiet. Too many of us don't know how to shut up.
Have I ever talked about my irritation with this feminist concept of "storytelling"?
I have the same aversion with artists. Without clicking through it sounds like the highlighted author does too. If your "art" doesn't speak to the beholder and requires a "story" to sell to a reluctant public then IMO it's not good enough. I don't mean painters should be confined to realism but their output should "speak for itself." Maybe there's a tiny minority out there with gobs of cash and splashes of color with no discernible form "speaks to them" but I have the strong feeling that they bought the "art" for decoration not contemplation.
I mean people have been debating Mona Lisa's smile for over 500 years now! Have you EVER heard people discussing a modern work that, do people really debate what splashed of paint on a canvass mean in the way they debate actual brush strokes by the Masters? I'm happy to see push back on the absurd idea that art needs a spokesman to help the beholder "understand" it's deep meaning. Just write fiction if that's your urge.
Interesting that his emphasis in the quote Althouse made her headline is about what is embarrassing. The reviewer seems to be saying that once you would have lost face for preferring a know-nothing comedian's art opinions over the entrenched art-world consensus that Picasso was on top of the modernist heap.
That says the subject here is really status. The Brooklyn Museum should be losing status for this show. And anyone who goes to see it should also lose status.
With whom? Well, it doesn't tell us -- or maybe all the rest of it behind the paywall does tell us, I wouldn't know. With the arbiters of NYC society who determine these matters. So, then, once as determined by the old New York knickerbockers, to the 400, to.... hmm, could it be to the New York Times?
Yes, it could be and it used to be. So maybe this fellow is just upset that his opinion doesn't go as far as it used to. The status pecking order is shifting. It is certainly NOT disappearing, not from the endless status competitions of our largest city. Status is entirely what the NYC art world is about.
Course, where I live no one is going to lose any sleep over what the NYT thinks of anything. They won't even know. They certainly won't care. But we're supposed to care!
Huh. Nonetheless, we don't. Freedom! LOL
When did the definition of comedian get expanded to include miserable social critics who have never laughed in their lives?
I've been quite comfortable saying I don't like Jackson Pollock or Duchamp's fountain.
I really like Guernica though and think that people are attacking Picasso because they don't like him rather than his art.
I really like Guernica though
I've always had the feeling it was a bit fake. Fake emotion, that is.
“My story has value,” Gadsby said in “Nanette”; and then, “I will not allow my story to be destroyed”; and then, “Stories hold our cure.”
When the only tool you have is a hammer........
I feel like I know what you mean about the use of the word “story.” But I see that more and more it’s being replaced by the word “content,” which I think is even worse.
Hannah Gadsby is to comedy as Cream of Wheat is to ham and eggs. She should give up her quixotic attempts at comedy as a service to Mankind, and take up a career in something she has a knack for.
Art stands or falls alone. The artist is irrelevant.
I have always felt that Picasso peaked with Portrait of Olga in the Armchair. I was in a Picasso retrospective once wondering what Picasso as an old man really thought about his late doodlings of Minotaurs and the like. Did he think about how good he was in his youth? Did he never think "Why not create something beautiful?" His work after 1945 or so just became boring. I kept asking myself "What's the story here?"
Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole...
If *art* requires an accompanying *story* or *storyteller*, of what value is said art? Is it merely, if not literally, an empty frame?
One cannot communicate by imposing esoteric strictures upon symbols. I should admit, art snobs have often claimed such gifts, but, it appears a *comedian* wants “some of that”.
"But it's women artists the exhibition really shortchanges".
Women artists? What about minority artists? What about homosexual artists? What about elephant artists? What about ...
What about handicapped artists? And artists of color? What about artists of odor? You say you don't need no stinking artists? The unbathed community has a lived experience too, you know.
People like her are parasites on creators. She builds her career on criticizing creators. If she had her way all art would resemble that of Communist Russia or China. Disgusting and totalitarian in impulse.
Another interesting question is, at what time in history did the personality/behavior/beliefs of the artist become a significant part of the critical review of the artist's work?
There are records of artists and crafstmen being blasted for their work not meeting expectations for millenia, but I'm asking about blasting artists for being themselves. The earliest written description of this I've found is in Lawrence Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey" wherein the author narrates his disappointment upon meeting the author of his favorite hymn. The author did not live up to his creation of the grandeloquent hymn personally, being boring and lacking conversation skills. That was just a couple of centuries ago.
Was Michelangelo chided for misbehavior by Pope Julian, or was their relationship all about that chapel ceiling? I've only seen the Charlton Heston & Rex Harrison version of this, so who knows?
Ea-Nasir also comes to mind, as being very, very long ago, and as being both incompetent and unethical, but that was more a trade dispute than a critical review of art and artist. https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea-nasir-the-oldest-recorded-customer-complaint
From Naked city ending: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
You wrote April 28, 2011: How did the term "storytelling" catch on over the last quarter century as a positive way to talk about narration of real-world events? If I remember correctly, before about 1980, the term "storytelling" mainly referred to fiction or lying.
Maybe one answer is because of TV.
"Classical painting is pleasantly visual. Avant garde painting requires the secret decoder ring to know what the cool art critics think is cool. To normal people most of it looks like crap."
No, it doesn't. Appreciation of avant garde painting just requires having the willingness to look at art that is not immediately familiar, not merely a faithful reproduction of the real world in paint or pencil. Most people today can read but don't, and most people don't have enough interest in art to look at painting that isn't immediately comprehensible or "pleasantly" visual. There is nothing wrong with representational art, as such, and there is nothing wrong with "modern" art, as such. Just as there is much bad modern art, there is much bad "realistic" art.
Some of the art critic verbiage written about modern art or avant-garde art--whatever term may be used--is thoughtful and informative, but much is simply pompous and obfuscating navel-gazing or egoistic presumption by non-artists who presume to explain what they can't do to those who don't trust themselves to take in the art without finding validation in a critic's words.
In the end, art has to be enjoyable to the recipient, whether it is familiar and easily comprehended or is unfamiliar and not so immediately comprehended. All (visual) art is just an arrangement of marks and/or paint smears on paper or canvas, an arrangement of color, value, tone, shape and line that is, if successful, visually pleasing, or at least intriguing in some way. If one is innately interested in art and enjoys by temperament looking at art, one is probably more willing to look without judgement at work that may first seem unyielding to "understanding." (It's not that one "understands," but simply finds pleasure in the artist's arrangement of shape, color, line, etc. in the work. Visual art can be as absent of innate meaning and yet be as pleasurable as music, which is entirely abstract.)
I did not like Willem de Kooning's work at first, a few isolated things excepted, until I read a biography of his life. As I followed his development (as told in the book) from young man and artist to older, established master, I took him in over time, thinking about and looking at his development as an artist. I came to love his work, and I find it visually exciting, dynamic, and beautiful. I didn't read what the critics said, and in the various monographs of his work that I own--as with other artists' monographs I have--I read little or nothing of the text added by the art critics/authors of the monographs. I just take pleasure looking at the pictures.
BTW: De Kooning was trained in commercial art as an adolescent, and he mastered drawing and painting in the traditional manner. Unlike many of his peers, he had no hesitance in expressing his appreciation for an illustrator like Norman Rockwell, as de Kooning understood the training, hard work, and skill it took for Rockwell to produce his masterful work. I look at de Kooning's abstract and semi-abstract works and I see his masterful draughtsmanship in what may superficially appear to some as just dashed off doodles.
She’s trading on Picasso & Trump.
Another barnacle
Trust the art, not the artist.
Art is a lie that is the truth.
The Great Gadsby
I've been hearing the buzzword "stories" — and "storytelling" — since the 1980s. It has always irritated me.
I have the same reaction to the word "narrative." Journalists who engage in narrative, as opposed to fact-based reporting, are odious swine. Spare me your fucking "stories." Tell the truth, bitches!
Of course it can be incredibly hard to know what the truth is. (Rashomon is a favorite of mine). Some mysteries are hard to solve. Christianity shrugs off proof -- some things are too big for humanity to know -- and offers faith instead.
I would love for our journalists to practice humility and see their craft as the search for truth. Acknowledge you might be wrong.
Ditto you scientists who are sure the world is ending!
And you want to blot out the sun!
Instead of searching for truth, these people adopt a theory, or narrative, and ignore all the data that contradicts the narrative. Worse, you attack the facts, bury the facts, hide the facts, dismiss the facts, ignore the facts. Your narrative is all-important and facts are a danger to it.
What you're doing, kids, is propaganda. That's why it's so notable that people on the left no longer give a shit about free speech. You can't handle the truth, and so you hide it because you're afraid people will hear it and know it's true.
Your urge to censor is a fear of the truth and a fear that the truth will upset people. As Jesus put it, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
The accusation is always that people didn't like something because they found it too challenging. That's a nice bit of self-congratulation.
My experience of modern or avant-garde art is kind of strange. There are some artists - Kandinsky and Miro, for example - that "work" for me. I enjoy their art, and find it appealing. For whatever reason, Picasso isn't one of them. I can appreciate his significance, but usually I'm unaffected by his actual paintings.
I did see a Pollack live, and it blew me away. I don't know why, but it resonated with me. I can't explain why. But I've been to a number of modern art exhibitions and museums and left angry at the crap I just witnessed.
No conclusion, other than that taste is subjective.
“Gadsby is a standup comedian who has lambasted Picasso for being a sexist.”
Too bad Picasso can’t be in the audience. He’d be laughing harder than anyone.
I am sick of the concept of "woman [insert profession or hobby here]". Special identity ghetto.
I love art museums, and I generally wander in the classical galleries, with their portraits and landscapes. Modern art, by contrast, appears disjointed and discordant, as if modern man and woman no longer know who they are or where they are.
Story and narrative, emotion and experience--these are surely the favored things now. Reason and propositional truths are suspect.
I suggest Picasso is more garde than avant garde at this point.
Gadsby used to be a regular on local comedian/raconteur Andrew Denton's chat show in which she was an endearing, highly-intelligent, young adult still figuring it all out.
I guess we all have to grow up, but it's a pity some people do.
Just read an online argument about the value of John Coltrane’s screeching and squawking. The consensus of the cognoscenti seems to be that if you don’t like avant gard jazz from the 60s you’re either uninformed or just plain stupid. Someone brought up Jackson Pollack. I’m with the great unwashed crowd who thinks these guys were pulling our chain. Fortunately for them there were plenty of gullible critics willing to tell us how brave and wonderful it all was.
Robert, please note that I said:
"Classical painting is pleasantly visual. Avant garde painting requires the secret decoder ring to know what the cool art critics think is cool. To normal people most of it looks like crap."
You said:
"No, it doesn't. Appreciation of avant garde painting just requires having the willingness to look at art that is not immediately familiar, not merely a faithful reproduction of the real world in paint or pencil......"
I say: As if Van Gogh or the Pre-Raphaelites or Impressionist were just the I-phone users of their day. And then you self-refute:
"In the end, art has to be enjoyable to the recipient, whether it is familiar and easily comprehended or is unfamiliar and not so immediately comprehended."
Thanks for reinforcing my point about "normal people"
Freeman Hunt said...
I am sick of the concept of "woman [insert profession or hobby here]". Special identity ghetto.
6/2/23, 6:23 PM”
I’m getting sick of all the first { fill in the blank } to ( do x y z ). We’ve been doing it now for 70 years and it’s getting old. What was it last week? First woman to command a space mission on a private commercial flight. It's getting like sports where there’s some kind if trivial new record set every day. “1st left handed golfer to make a hole in one in the third round of a major .” Yawn.
The "story" matters to art. Without the story, Picasso was just a painter of ugly paintings. Without the story, Dylan is just a nasaly, off-key singer, playing mediocre songs and making a harmonica sound like cats rutting. It's only the story that makes either man important and sets them in timespace where their cultural impact can be appreciated. Otherwise, all you have is the art itself, with no context, and some art cannot be comprehended properly that way.
Highly attractive man has contempt for the women who throw themselves at him, women just turned on more. Everybody lies in the story of who they are and what their deepest motives are, except women who seek the company of men who are adored and richly rewarded by an entire civilization, like Picasso.
Gadsby - phony
Plus 1 to mikee. What does the artist's personal life have to do with it.
I've often thought that the Boomers were the first generation raised on 3 o4 4 hours of fiction a night thanks to television. Nice easy stuff that resolved in half an hour or an hour.
Over the entire 20th Century, visual artists went from representational art to visual effects; from narration comprehensible to the viewer, to meta, self referential convention breaking within their visual art genres.
It doesn't matter what woman is walking down the stairs nude. Duchamp made a painting about painting. Its subject could as well have been a banana. At least then the appeal would be obvious.
"Thanks for reinforcing my point about 'normal people'"
A flip answer, unfounded.
You assert that "normal people" do not/cannot appreciate avant garde art, and I dispute that. You have not made a case for your assertion. (BTW, who--or what--are "normal" people?) All it takes is the willingness to just look at a painting as an arrangement of colors and shapes on the canvas, not asking that it be recognizable as an image of something in the world. As I said, what does music mean? It is merely an arrangements of notes in series, typically played to a tempo, with no explicable meaning. Yet it moves us. Pure visual experience, unrelated to a depiction of recognizable imagery, can also move us in the same way, and appreciation of such art does not require one have a degree or any deep reading in the history of art. Just look and be open, discard any expectations of what "art" or "painting" must or should be. Plenty of people do.
P.S.
"I say: As if Van Gogh or the Pre-Raphaelites or Impressionist were just the I-phone users of their day."
I have no idea what you mean here. Can you explain?
(BTW, Van Gogh and the Impressionists were initially hated by the art establishment and to many viewers of that time, the works seen as crude and ugly, dispensing with the accepted "skill" and tenets of "proper" painting of that time. Now, over a century later, anyone can see at first glance the beauty of Van Gogh's work and of the Impressionists...because they have become familiar to us, they no longer confound our expectations of what paintings should be.)
"The consensus of the cognoscenti seems to be that if you don’t like avant gard jazz from the 60s you’re either uninformed or just plain stupid."
I'm having flashbacks of The Fast Show's Jazz Club :-)
Robert Cook said...
"BTW, Van Gogh and the Impressionists were initially hated by the art establishment..."
So the art establishment called great art dreck then, and is calling dreck great art now. In baseball, we call that going 0 for 2.
Robert Cook said...
"Just look and be open, discard any expectations of what 'art' must or should be."
Future art histories will consider the greatest visual artists of the mid 20th century to be automotive designers like Harley Earl (and his tailfins), Virgil Exner, and Bill Mitchell, to name a few.
"The accusation is always that people didn't like something because they found it too challenging. That's a nice bit of self-congratulation."
Yes I agree, But Math MS aspirants taking Math Analysis and Abstract Algebra find that they fail because they can't understand. So it is rather the power of the thinking required. Euler, Riemann, and Cantor presented clear orthodoxy, to be built upon or challenged, but the avaunt garde were just shitting it out.
They never had a coherent theory of art. Only Abstraction and Shock.
You can't tell someone how to enjoy things, but abstract or non-representational art can be very interesting and vibrant.
One thing that can help you to "get it" is if you see some really good stuff mixed in with more average works. I was recently in New York and toured the Christie's auction house gallery of works they had assembled for an upcoming auction. Over and over, I'd see something bold and striking and sure enough, the name on the card would be someone I'd already heard of -- Kandinski, De Kooning, etc.
For a Jackson Polluck, I think you have to see the painting in person to get it. From close up, the textures and colors are fascinating. Not something you can capture in a digital photo, unfortunately.
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